Transcript

TEDxEast - Bruce Feiler - 05/07/10

[Music] [Laughter] [Music] when I was four years old my family moved to a new neighborhood in my hometown of Savannah Georgia all the streets in this neighborhood were named after Confederate War generals we lived on Robert E Lee Boulevard and when I turned five my parents gave me an orange TN Stingray bicycle it had a swooping banana seat and these AP Hanger handlebars because it made the rider look like an orangutang and one day I was exploring our neighborhood and I pedal into a major thoroughfare and Wham I was hit by a passing sedan my mangled bike flew in One Direction my mangled body in another a neighbor came running out Andy Andy how are you doing she said using the name of my older brother I'm Bruce I said and promptly passed out I broke my left femur that day it's the largest bone in your body and for 38 years that accident was the only medically interesting thing to ever happen to me until in in fact I made a living by walking I traveled around the world wrote a series of books including walking the Bible and America's prophet in June 2008 a routine blood test showed an elevated number that suggested something was wrong with my bones a bone scan suggested I had a tumor in my leg that led to to an x-ray to an MRI and then to a call from my doctor the tumor in your leg is not consistent with a benign tumor it I stopped walking and it took a second for my mind to convert that double negative into a single much more horrifying negative I have cancer suddenly I was the walking guy who might never walk again and it seemed like too much of a coincidence that it was the same bone in the same place in my body I went home that afternoon and my twin daughters Eden and tyby came running to meet me girly girls Eden and tyby had just turned three and they were interested in all things about princesses and cupcakes and and all things pink and purple our favorite nickname for them came from their birthday which was April 15th 2005 and after they were born our doctor looked his watch and was like hm tax day early Filer and late filer so on this day uh Eden and tyu started doing this dance and they were twirling frantically in a circle until they tumbled to the ground I crumbled I kept imagining all the walks I might not take with them the boyfriends I might not scowl at the aisles I might not walk down and I kept thinking that they would lack somehow for my voice in their lives 3 days later I woke with an idea of how I might give them that voice I would reach out to six men from all parts of my life and ask them to be present through the passages in my my daughter's lives my girls will have plenty of opportunities I wrote these men they'll have loving families but they may not have their dad will you help be their dad and I said to myself that I would call this group of men the Council of dads I almost didn't tell my wife Linda about this idea you know we should focus on the positive but within 24 hours I had lost my resolve and as soon as I told her she loved the idea but then she promptly started rejecting my nominees oh I like him she said not entirely convincingly but I would never ask him for advice so it turns out that starting a council of doubts was a very efficient way to find out what my wife really thought of my friends so we needed a set of guidelines first we said basically uh no family only friends then we said only men and finally intimacy over longevity we figured some of my newer friends might better capture the dad I wanted to be and then I sat down with each of these men and I asked them to convey one uh one sort of message to my girls how to live how to think how to dream Linda my wife joked that it was like having six different wedding proposals with these guys I sort of friend married each one so the first of these was Jeff shumlin I first met Jeff in 1983 he led a summer trip I took to Europe and on that first week we were staying in a youth hostel in an old castle in Holland and I went to slip behind this castle at night and Jeff sat down beside me there was a moat a fence and a field of cows and Jeff leaned over and he said he like ever been cow tipping I was like cow what he's like cow tipping cow sleep standing up so if you approach them from behind you can push them over and they go thud in the mud well before I could know anything we had jumped the moat we scaled the fence and we were tiptoeing through these piles of dung and we were approaching some poor dozing cow so basically what happened was you Jeff went back to Vermont he took over his parents student travel company he spent part of every day riding around in his tractor and it was these values we wanted Jeff to convey to our girls what it means to know your neighbors where you come from and yet be open to the world Jeff would teach them how to travel so a few weeks after my diagnosis we drove up to Vermont Jeff and I went and sat in an apple orchard and I read him my letter will you help be their dad and I got to the end he was crying and I was crying and he looked at me and he said yes I was like yes I had forgotten there was a question at the heart of this letter and frankly it never occurred to me that somebody would turn me down and then I asked a question that I would ultimately ask all of the dads which is what's the one piece of advice you would give to our girls and the answers I got were so sort of moving to me I decided that I should do this I should capture I should write a book of wisdom for my girls and Jeff's piece of advice was be a traveler not a tourist you know seize the opportunity get off the comfortable path approach the cow so I said to Jeff okay so it's 10 years from now my girls are about to take their first trip abroad what would you tell them he said girls I would encourage you to approach this experience as a child might approach a mud puddle you can bend over and look at the reflection and maybe you know run your finger through the water or you can jump in and thrash around and see what it feels like what it smells like Jeff had that glint I first saw behind that castle in Holland that glint that said let's go cow tipping even though we never did tip the cow even though no one tips the cow even though cows don't sleep standing up he said I want to see you back here girls at the end of this experience covered in mud two weeks after my diagnosis a biopsy confirmed I had a 7-in osteosarcoma in my left femur 600 people a year get an osteosarcoma 85% are under 21 only 100 adults a year get this disease 20 years ago doctors would have cut off my leg and hoped there was a 15% survival rate then they discovered that one cocktail of chemo could be effective and within weeks I started this regimen I got what's called a chemo sandwich four months of chemotherapy followed by a 15-hour surgery in which my surgeon Dr John Healey cut out my left femur replaced it with titanium took my left fibula from my calf and relocated it to my thigh and then cut out a third of my quadricep muscle only two human beings before me have ever survived this surgery and my reward for surviving it was four more months of chemo and in those early weeks we all had nightmares one night I dreamed uh I got up in the middle of the night and went to my office and there were photographs of other children sitting on my desk one night my daughter Eden uh had a dream that monsters had come into her house and were eating us up I can't walk she said to me it didn't take a PhD to realize that she had internalized our will my illness and what I said to her was that the best way to keep the monsters at Bay is what we told them time and again to stick together as a family and that's what we did by the end of my year I realized maybe our girls had become an ounce more compassionate a dose more caring my daughter tyby had a great line she said Daddy I have so much love in my body for you I can't stop giving you hugs and kisses and when I have no more love left I just drink milk because that's where love comes from and one night my daughter Eden one night my daughter Eden came to the side of my bed and as I got out to take her back to her room she reached to hand me my crutches and if I could cling to one memory from my lost year it would be me and my daughter walking down a darken hallway at 4 in the morning with five little fingers grasping the spongy handle underneath my hand the crutch at that moment I didn't need it anymore because I was walking on air one unexpected gift of the Council of dads was that it forced me to sit down with my closest friends and and tell them what they really meant to me and I realize how rare that actually is and I just want to tell you a few more lessons I learned from my dad and some of the men on my my counsil were easy to pick but I kept coming back to one unexpected name he was my oldest friend the one whose birthday I never forget and whose childhood phone number I still remember the one who still looks eight to me despite the pounds and the gray hair he's the friend with whom I have nothing in common except that we grew up together and yet when I got sick he was the friend I had to call Ben Edwards grew up just around the corner from me uh in Savannah Georgia he was kind of a classic souer he ate bow peanuts and drank sweet tea and rooted for the Georgia Bulldogs and he still does and and and these are the values that Lind and I wanted him to convey what it means to come from a place and yet always to go back to that place and so I asked Ben where he might take my girls one day to tell him what we were like as kids he said you know that that stinky ditch behind your house where we used to catch tadpoles I was like the canal could you possibly learn from there he said it was skanking and disgusting but it's where we learned to be ourselves and I realiz you know Ben had hit on this truth he was my tadpole he was that friend who was there at the beginning who returned to remind me that we were once two squiggly boys trying to grow arms and legs and hop off into the world and I learned that I had let that those tadpoles go away from me I hadn't figured out a way to bring my friends into my kids' lives so much in our culture conspires actually against friendship and what the Council of dadge proved to be about was building a bridge between my friends and my family tender tadpoles you never know when you might need a pal one thing that surprised me about my journey was how much I learned about fatherhood the men in my Council in many ways were more communicative than their dads and the things that that they we talk about I guess they we all talk about is our our feelings our fears even our weight this journey ended up being about sort of a window into male Intimacy in a lot of ways and no man captures this better than David black David is my literary agent and the first time I met him he was sitting in a chair in Manhattan I should say he's 5' three and a half on a good day standing upright in cowboy boots and the first time I met him he took one look at my 6'2 body and said if I were your height I'd be in the NBA self-d delusion is a wonderful thing so David way he's a classic man's man right he he answers the phone yo mother eer uh he's hyper competitive he bought a Sports of All cliches he bought a sports car on his 50th birthday actually like a lot of men he's impatient he really bought it on his 49th but on the new mail front he leaves work early to coach little leag he hugs he bakes someone asked me if David cried when I asked him to be in my Council of dads I was like David cries when you invite him for a walk so being literary agent is being a broker of Dreams in a world in which most dreams don't come true and this is what Linda and I wanted him to convey to our girls his finess at handling both the aspirations and the setbacks of his clients David would teach them how to dream so what's the best thing you can give to a dreamer I asked him a belief in themselves he said okay fine but when I walk into your office I don't believe I didn't believe I was at a wall I don't see the wall he said and I'm telling you the same don't see the wall of course you may encounter a wall from time to time but you find a way to get over it or around it or under it whatever you do don't give into it don't succumb to the wall so 20 years from now my daughter comes and she has a dream I said she wants to open a restaurant or climb a mountain or write a book what do you tell her I tell her let's make the awesome mundane let's find a road map to the top of the mountain let's make an out an outline for the book A business plan for the restaurant and if that dream should fail I said and we're going to find a dream that can work because Anybody Can Dream an Impossible Dream but only a few find a dream that's possible and those are the ones that are happy our house is not far from the Brooklyn Bridge and during the year and a half that I was on crutches it became a sort of symbol to me so one day I said to my girls come on let's take a walk across the Brooklyn Bridge I spent a lot of time during my year thinking about walking and basically walking upright it's the one thing that most distinguishes us from our ancestors and yet for the 4 million years we've been doing it it's basically unchanged as my physical therapist likes to say every step is a tragedy waiting to happen you stumble with one leg then you catch yourself with the other so during you know one of the things that I learned when you're on crutches you're forced to walk slowly you hurry you get to your destination but you get there alone you go slow you get to your destination you get there with the community you've built along the away at the risk of admission I was never nicer than when I was on crutches in the 1840s a new type of pedestrian appeared in Paris he was called a Flur one who ambles the arcades and it was the tradition among these Flur to take a turtle for a walk and let the reptile set the pace I love this o to slow moving and it became sort of a motto for my girls take a walk with a turtle behold the world in pause on top of the bridge we settled under a crowded walkway and I opened up my nap my napsack and pulled out a surprise four saucers four cups and a kettle and just after midday with the Empire State Building on our left and Lady Liberty on our right and for no other reason then we'd reach the end of a long year we held a tea party on top of the world this idea of pausing may be the single biggest lesson I took from my journey in the Bible God asked the Israelites every seven years to let your land lay fallow and every 49 years the land should get an extra year of rest during which all families should be reunited and all people surrounded with the ones they love that 50th year is called the Jubilee year and though I'm happily still shy of 50 that tradition perfectly captures my experience my lost year was my Jubilee year by Lying phow by laying fallow I planted the seeds for a heal healthier future by starting a council of dads I was reunited with the ones I love you know and sometimes I wonder if I might forget what I learned right there's still a lot of vices out there that are very attractive to me I still want to hurry in my life but far beneath my clothes here I have a reminder in Genesis Jacob wrestles with an angel one night and the Angel leaves a scar on Jacob's leg and forever after he walks with a limp I too have a scar and though mine is less lofty it's probably a little longer it goes all the way from my hip all the way down to my ankle on the Oney year anniversary of my diagnosis I went to see my surgeon Dr Healey by the way Healey great name for a doctor um so like today I was cancer-free and I was beginning to take my first steps and I said Doctor you know if my girls come to you and say what should we learn from our Daddy's story what will you tell them he said I'll tell them what I know which is that everybody dies but not everybody lives I want you to live I wrote a letter to Eden and tyy that appears at the end of the Council of dads and in it I wrote all the wisdom I heard from my dads approach the cow pack your flipflops tend your Tad Pooles don't see the Wall Live the questions Harvest Miracles and as I looked at this list I thought you know to me it was sort of like a PSAL book of living I realized it may have been intended for my girls but I'm the who really needed it and that's the secret at the heart of the Council of dads Linda and I did it for our girls but it changed us and so I end this day this wonderful day with this wish may you find a mud puddle to jump in may you find an excuse to reach out to your tadpole may you find a way to get over around or through any wall that stands between you and one of your dreams and one of these days grab a friend grab a turtle and take a long slow walk thank you very much [Applause]